Solace by the sea

The beach has a profound attraction for many Australians. So why has its spiritual and cultural significance largely been ignored, wonders Fiona Capp.

In Nevil Shute's apocalyptic novel On the Beach, Melbourne is the
last place on earth untouched by nuclear war. It is only a matter of time before
the deadly radiation drifts south on the wind. When an American submarine
arrives at Williamstown, the American commander is invited to stay with an
Australian naval officer and his family. They take him to a beach in Port
Phillip Bay where they spend their time swimming, sailing and sunbaking. The
following day the Australians ask the American if he would like to go to the
beach again. The American says that as it is a Sunday he would prefer to go to
church.

It is a telling moment of cultural difference.

As the end approaches, the American turns to God, the Australians turn to the
sea. No judgement is made by Shute. There is no suggestion the Australians are
being shallow or are in denial. What he does seem to be saying is that going to
the beach is as valid a response as going to church. In a simple yet profound
way the Australian characters in On The Beach - who might be described
as instinctive existentialists - give meaning to their final days.

This national portrait is confirmed by a survey conducted by the Christian
Research Association a few years ago that found that 71 per cent of Australians
always or often experienced a sense of peace and wellbeing by the sea, as
opposed to just over a quarter who felt this way in church or when praying.

These findings suggest that people now find the spiritual, psychological or
emotional solace at the seaside that they once found in church. They also fly in
the face of a long-held assumption - reflected in Australian literature until
relatively recently - that our relationship with the sea is a purely hedonistic,
escapist one and that beach culture is frivolous and not to be taken seriously.
The bush and the desert might yield recondite experiences or revelations, but
not the beach.

Given that more than 90 per cent of Australians live on the coast, it is not
surprising that so many of us grow up with "sand in our souls", as historian
Leone Huntsman so eloquently puts it. The surprising thing is how we have played
down the cultural and spiritual significance of this littoral landscape.

When researching the role of the beach in Australian history, Huntsman was
struck by the lack of historical documentation about beach life in Australia. In
her book, Sand in Our Souls, she argues that Australian intellectuals have
tended to regard the beach as too trivial a subject to warrant serious
consideration.

Why is it that we lack a coastal mythology comparable with bush mythology?
One reason given is that the beach has not been regarded as a place where one
can learn the Protestant values of hard work and fortitude. Huntsman also says
the absence of the beach from "high culture" could lie in our collective
ignorance of its history. We know all about the explorers and settlers pushing
the inland frontier but little about what happened on the beaches or how we, as
an island nation, engaged with the sea.

The history of Australians' relationship with the ocean began with the
arrival of the first Aborigines across the Torres Strait 60,000 years ago. Yet,
once again, when we think of Aboriginal culture, we tend to think of the
Outback, the desert, rather than the coast.

Around Port Phillip Bay, all that remains to remind us of the Bunurong
people's regular summer migrations down the Mornington Peninsula and
Westernport, and their knowledge of the marine life that could be harvested from
the sea platforms, are a few shell middens exposed in the cliff faces.

In northern Australia, coastal tribes still carry on the traditions of their
sea-dreaming forebears. Their mythology links them with sea gods and heroes
whose journeys define the various clans' existing marine territories. As sea
hunters and collectors, they know the rhythms and patterns of the ocean
intimately. They have a mental map of the ocean defined by secular and sacred
"seamarks", which include islands, reefs, headlands, beaches, dugong areas,
sandbars, deep-water areas, rocks where pelicans sleep, and tidal currents,
which they call "roads in the sea".

They navigate by the stars, the movements of seabirds, the smell of the tides
and the degree of phosphorescence in the water. In her book Saltwater
Peoples, Nonie Sharp observes that many Australians know that Inuit-Eskimo
people have more than 60 names for snow, but that few of us are aware that the
Torres Strait Islanders have 80 words for the different tides.

While European Australians are not sea people to this extent, those who
regularly surf, sail, fish, dive, beachcomb or swim along the coast share an
understanding of the ocean in all its moods and live attuned to the movements of
the wind, the tides and the swell. This sense of being in harmony with the
natural world and the cycles of life is a big part of any relationship with the
ocean.

Most Australians grow up in the suburbs and the sea offers an alternative to
this confined, tamed and de-natured environment. West Australian author Tim
Winton writes of how, as the bushland around his street began to be cleared and
fenced off, it felt that in the end, "only the sea was left unfenced, unowned.
In the world of childhood it was a saving refuge and because of the shrinkage of
my natural world I looked to it fiercely."

For those who do not live on the coast, part of the pleasure of going to the
seaside is the sense of escaping the city and all the responsibilities that go
with one's ordinary working life. This was one of the themes I was exploring in
That Oceanic Feeling, a memoir about returning to surfing after a long
break and the struggle to find a balance between what I call "the domestic" and
"the oceanic".

One reason I think we have tended to be dismissive of the beach experience is
that we are still in the thrall of the mythology of the epic sea voyage. Like
the saltwater people, we have inherited a cultural tradition that influences the
way we perceive and experience the sea. Almost all the great Western sea sagas,
from Homer's Iliad onwards, are about men leaving their wives,
children, lovers and the security of terra firma to fight wars, to conquer new
lands, to trade or to fish. Or, as in The Odyssey, the hero is on his
way home to his wife but is constantly waylaid by sex and adventure. Then there
are the epic tales of the explorers and the First Fleet.

To go to the beach, on the other hand, has not been
considered the kind of courageous, character-forming journey worthy of
celebration in literature. After all, when you go for a surf or a swim, you can
be home in time for tea.

Yet if we can free ourselves of the machismo of seafaring mythology, beach
pursuits such as surfing allow for a new conception of adventure in which we do
not need to go "in far" (to borrow from the poet Robert Frost) in order to go
"out deep". The domestic and the oceanic can co-exist and enrich each other.

"The time of departure, of transport and arrival," says writer Julia
Kristeva, "is what psychoanalysts would call 'obsessional time'." Most of the
time, we operate on obsessional time. Our lives are governed by work hours and
school hours, the need to get somewhere and then get home again. But when we
step on to the beach we step into another dimension. The corollary of not going
anywhere - except for a swim, surf, snorkel or a bit of a sail - is that we find
ourselves suspended in the moment.

Immersed in the here and now, we experience what Kristeva calls "monumental
time", which is "all-embracing and infinite". Surfer and writer Nick Carroll
perfectly captures this experience when talking about what he calls the Zen
Buddhist aspects of surfing.

"You throw yourself so heavily into the moment that you're actually inside
everything that's happening. You're inside the wave, you're inside the surfboard
and what it's doing. You're inside all the landscape around you and the ocean as
it's surging. You get totally inside the moment and it's so intense that time
disappears."

In the visual arts, it has been the "low" art of photography rather than the
"high" art of painting that has responded to and captured this immersion in the
moment. Max Dupain's iconic photograph Sunbaker, featuring a man's head
and shoulders resting on the sand, the skin still wet and shimmering from the
surf, is perhaps the most famous. Here is the moment of repose after
exertion.

But the moment of anticipation before immersion is also an exquisite part of
the beach experience, as contemporary photographer Tim Hixson shows in his
collection Beach. The book opens with the small figure of a boy running
down a path that leads to the beach and a side-on shot of a pregnant woman in
bathers.

No photographs I have seen better capture the ecstasy of that moment of
literal immersion than the underwater shots of Trente Parke and Narelle Autio in
which swimmers merge into great explosions of light that could be bubbles or
clouds in the sky. In one shot, a glowing hand like that of God's in
Michelangelo's Creation in the Sistine Chapel reaches down through the
water toward the shadowy figure of a woman. These are photographs that capture
the ethereal, otherworldliness of the sea.

As these images suggest, losing yourself in the moment is also about giving
yourself up to a force vastly greater than yourself. The sensations often
produced - delight and awe mingled with terror - were known to the Romantic
poets as "the sublime". For Winton, the danger, freedom and intensity of
freediving can produce a feeling akin to a religious experience. "On the seabed,
or gliding midwater with everything sharp in focus and my body aching with
pleasant, urgent hunger, I understand the Christian mystics for moments at a
time."

Others, such as Robert Drewe, tend to emphasise the sensuousness or the
sexual ecstasy of this loss of self in the sea and the poignant transience of
it. In his story The Bodysurfers, the main character David reflects on
his "old ocean days" when he was young and at his most happy. "It was a
combination of the exhilarating charge of the surf, the plunge on a wave, the
currents pummelling and streaming along the body, the skin stretched salty and
taut across the shoulders, the pungent sweetness of suntan oil, the sensual
anticipation of future summer days and nights."

The peace of body and mind to be found by the sea can also be understood in
psychological and biological terms. The beach sanctions all kinds of
unstructured play and reverie, from building sand castles to meditating on the
endless march of the waves. As well as reconnecting us with childhood pleasures
and memories of sexual awakening, the sea helps "assuage our basic, universal
and inconsolable grief", says Huntsman.

This grief is twofold: an unconscious grief produced by separation from the
mother in infancy; and, later, the grief that comes from the realisation that we
must die. When we immerse ourselves in the ocean we return to "the vast
undifferentiated matrix" as if returning to the amniotic fluid of the womb where
we swam our first strokes.

Few images better capture this primal "at oneness" than that of the surfer
crouched inside the crystal, womb-like tube of a breaking wave; an image made
all the more exquisite by our knowledge of the wave's imminent destruction.

And yet, when we see such images, we are unlikely to think of them in these
more profound terms because they have become synonymous with advertising, either
on giant billboards or in glossy surf magazines. The exploitation of the beach
for tourism and by surf companies is perhaps the most glaring reason why beach
pursuits still tend to be regarded as superficial and materialistic.

In the 1960s, soul surfing emerged as a response to the growing
commercialisation of the sport. Inspired by the hippy movement, soul surfing
shunned mainstream life for a more elemental existence on the beach. While this
beach philosophy endures, it is the hype of the multi-billion-dollar industry
that commands our attention.

But we don't have to let consumerism impoverish our sea culture. We can
reclaim it by recognising and celebrating the complex and profound reasons that
keep driving us to go down to the sea.

DOWN BY THE SEASIDE

Gift from the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh

A lyrical meditation on the struggle for balance between worldly, domestic
demands and the need for solitude by the ocean.

Haunts of the Black Masseur. The Swimmer as Hero by Charles
Sprawson

A literary exploration of the passion for swimming down through the ages,
from the Ancient Greeks to Australian Olympic champion Murray Rose.

Sand in Our Souls by Leone Huntsman

One of the many Australians who feels an emotional and spiritual bond with
the ocean, academic Leone Huntsman traces the history of the beach in Australian
life.

The Seventh Wave by Trent Parke and Narelle Autio

These haunting, dramatic photographs capture the psychological as well as the
physical dimension of Australians' love of the ocean.

Seven-Tenths. The Sea and its Thresholds by James
Hamilton-Paterson

A highly idiosyncratic yet beguiling mix of literature and science about the
sea.

Saltwater People by Nonie Sharp

In this ground-breaking study, Sharp writes about the sea dreaming of the
indigenous people of the northern coasts of Australia.

The Sea Around Us by Rachel Carson

A classic of sea literature, Carson transforms the scientific history of the
sea into a gripping, cosmic tale.

Land's Edge by Tim Winton

In these evocative personal essays, Winton meditates on what it means to be a
coastal dweller.